Recycler Bottles Up Business

Eaglebrook Making A Dent In Plastics Processing

Back in 1983, when almost no one was thinking about recycling, two idealistic young men named Andrew Stephens and Bob Thompson burned with a desire to make the world a better place.

Dedicated environmentalists from their youth, they wanted to wake people up to the possibilities of reusing perfectly good materials rather than throwing them away.

Now, the company they started as a result of their convictions, Eaglebrook Plastics, is one of the biggest plastics recyclers in the country.

That is undoubtedly how the Andy and Bob story would turn out if Hollywood were telling the tale. And it would be dead wrong, except for the last part about Eaglebrook`s success.

``I`d like to say, `Oh, sure, I had a vision to clean up the environment,` `` said Stephens, 34. ``But, no, we saw it as a business opportunity. I didn`t know what post-consumer recycling was in 1983.``

From humble beginnings in an apartment at North Avenue and Wells Street, Eaglebrook Plastics Inc., has grown in eight years into a major processor of discarded milk, soda and detergent bottles that are collected by as many as 400 recycling programs from as far away as the East Coast.

Although Stephens refuses to be exact about figures because Eaglebrook is privately held, the company processes almost 35 million plastic bottles a year and has sales in excess of $10 million.

The company buys mainly high-density polyethylene bottles, which bear the number 2 inside a recycling symbol, and polyethylene terephthalate containers, marked with a number 1. Last week, it took a major step into the emerging field of polystyrene recycling when the National Polystyrene Recycling Co., a joint project of eight major plastics companies, announced that Eaglebrook would run the company`s new polystyrene recycling plant on the South Side.

Polystyrene, marked with a number 6, is the material that makes up disposable cups, food trays and burger boxes. It is a natural direction for Eaglebrook to pursue because the two partners` goal is to provide a single recycling service for all household plastic containers.

``If we can do that, we can go to communities and say, `You don`t have to deal with a lot of companies,` `` Stephens said. ``We`ll do it all.``

The next step is installation of a unique automatic sorting machine at the company`s Roosevelt Road factory. Using an electric eye and a special computer program, the sorter will be able to recognize different types of plastic and direct them to the proper bin for processing. That will allow Eaglebrook to add rarer types of plastic containers, made from polypropylene

(marked with a 5) and polyvinyl chloride (marked with a 3), to the list of plastics it will accept.

When Stephens and Thompson began in 1983, recycling was at a low ebb. The initial enthusiasm for recycling that followed the first Earth Day in 1970 petered out during the Me Decade. It would seem to have been an inauspicious time to start a recycling business.

But for decades a vast, almost underground network of recycling companies, many of them in Chicago, have thrived by salvaging waste material that primary manufacturers routinely produce. In the case of plastics, the blow-molding companies that produce billions of plastic bottles annually toss out millions of imperfect specimens.

Stephens and Thompson realized that they could buy the spoiled bottles, grind them up, and sell the plastic back to bottle manufacturers. They bought a small grinding machine, which, they realized too late, required them to feed bottles into it one at a time.

That initial push got Eaglebrook off the ground, but its business was limited. The percentage of bottles spoiled in the manufacturing process is small.

Eaglebrook needed a twist, something to set it apart from other companies. In 1985, it got one. Labeling bottles inevitably results in a certain amount of spoilage, too, but the label`s glue and paper was impossible to separate from the plastic in the grinding process. The partners worked on a process to remove these contaminants from ground plastic, and suddenly they had a new source of supply and an advantage over competitors.

``We all need a break, no matter how smart we are,`` said Stephens. ``And that was it. That became our niche.``

This process is still a closely guarded secret. A banner in the company`s factory warns in large red letters that the section containing the cleaning equipment is restricted to employees only, and Stephens makes sure photographs of him in the plant do not give away any secrets.

It was a small step from recycling mislabeled bottles that never made it to market to doing the same thing with used, so-called ``post-consumer``

bottles. That insight led the company to begin buying bottles from a few recycling programs in 1985.